


Monstrous

by anticyclone



Category: Limetown
Genre: Gen, Limetown Survivor, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 20:00:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5511095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anticyclone/pseuds/anticyclone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cherish grows up in Limetown. Growing up in Limetown sucks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monstrous

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wickedtrue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wickedtrue/gifts).



> I was inspired by the excitement in your letter, and I had to write you a new survivor. I hope you like it. Happy Yuletide!

_ "So… how do we do this?" _

_ "I can ask you questions. Or, if you have a specific story you want to tell me, you can start there." _

_ "Okay." _

***

Cherish wakes up to a text uninviting her from Kimberly Lamb's twelfth birthday party and is too embarrassed to say anything to her parents.

They worry that she doesn't have enough friends here.

It wasn't going to be a sleepover, so Cherish just bikes to the soda shop instead of the Lamb's house when it's time to head out. Most kids walk places, but Cherish's auntie gave her a bike as a going away present, so she rides it every chance she gets.

She sits at the soda shop. She orders a strawberry malt milkshake. She always ordered a strawberry malt milkshake. (Now, she can't drink them. She can't even eat strawberries anymore. The smell makes her sick.)

That day, she sits in a booth. It gives her the space to turn her back to the shop and pull Kimberly's birthday present out of her backpack. She puts it in her lap and carefully unwraps it, crunching the paper up into a ball the size of her fist. It's Christmas paper - it made her laugh when she'd picked it out, and now she's glad that Kimberly never saw it, since Kimberly would probably think it was stupid.

The box holds a bunch of glittery gel pens. She doesn't know what she's going to do with them. Kimberly is the kind of person who likes to write with glittery gel pens. Cherish doesn't. Cherish has terrible handwriting, and she's left handed, so she smears her words when she writes.

When they moved to Limetown, her parents bought her a computer.

Cherish throws the gel pens away along with the straw wrapper and the Christmas paper. She waits three hours, makes up three funny stories to tell her parents about the party, and doesn't speak to Kimberly Lamb for two months.

***

_ "Can I ask what happened?" _

_ "What do you mean?" _

_ "Why did you… Why did Kimberly uninvite you from her party?" _

_ "I mean, that day, in the soda shop. I thought she just hated me. That I'd done something stupid." _

_ "And… had you?" _

_ "No. I mean. I was twelve, probably. But that wasn't why. I found out why on Monday, after the party." _

_ "Not two months later?" _

_ "No." _

***

All of them have been in Limetown since the beginning. Everybody, unless they were born there, has been in Limetown since the beginning. Nobody got moved in once they closed those gates. 

There are a couple of babies born inside. None of them, obviously, have to go to middle school. Middle school in Limetown is a small brick building with big desks in each classroom and computer labs and a backyard that has a student-run garden, although it's too cold the week after Kimberly's party for there to be any food in it.

Middle school in Limetown sucks.

Middle school everywhere probably sucks, but Cherish hates middle school in Limetown. She wants to go to college. She wants to go into the army. She wants to get an apprenticeship in a glass blowing studio. On Monday, she wants to do absolutely anything but walk into Limetown Middle School. But good girls go to school on Mondays, and Cherish is a good girl, so she goes.

All of her friends know that Kimberly uninvited her from the party. She's too embarrassed to talk to any of them, so she waits to go to class until the bell is about to ring, and she doesn't have to talk to anybody all morning.

It surprises her that two of them got uninvited too. She can tell, because Kimberly and the others are all at one table on the side of the cafeteria they never sit in, by the windows. Kimberly is smiling but not talking.

Everyone at Kimberly's table is smiling and not talking.

***

_ "Do you mean that Kimberly had gotten the tech?" _

_ "Yeah. What else could I mean?" _

_ "She was twelve." _

_ "You sound surprised. You talked to Dr. Finlayson, didn't you? You shouldn't be surprised." _

_ "I just. To do that to children. To experiment on kids. That's awful." _

_ "You can't lock adults up and concentrate ninety percent of their social life in one building. That's pretty easy to do with kids. Those of us without the tech, well. It was like not wearing the right clothes, and not talking right, and being ugly, and being stupid, all at once but worse. But it was a great environment to study the effects of the tech in." _

_ "I'm so sorry." _

_ "Can't do anything about it now. I do wonder sometimes why nobody cared that they all, all the kids with the tech I mean, they were all cheating on their tests and stuff. Who was going to stop them? Half the teachers didn't have the tech. Why wouldn't you cheat?" _

***

Everyone at Cherish's table sounds so loud that in a few weeks, hardly anybody speaks in the cafeteria at all, even though hardly anybody actually has the tech. It  _ feels  _ like everybody in the world but her has the tech, but that's not true. Even when she screams that at her parents when they won't stop asking her what's wrong, it's not true. 

She still has a few friends who talk to her - talk to her out loud. None of them have the tech. And of course, half the teachers don't. Their classes should be easier, but they're not, because anybody who does have the tech goofs off, and some of them won't answer out loud. For three straight months Cherish is the only one her math teacher calls on in her row. Algebra still makes her shudder.

Her parents don't put up with her screaming. They don't have the tech. They're both scientists, and she wants to know why they can't ask for it, but they won't tell her. No one will tell her anything. 

Limetown. Sucks.

Her grades drop, and not just in math. She doesn't want to go to school on Mondays. Sometimes she doesn't. It pisses her off that her parents say that means she's not a good girl. They don't have to go to class when half her teachers forget that they're not speaking out loud and they don't have time to repeat all the notes before the bell and then you fail the test because you don't know what chapter to read.

They don't have to stand at their locker next to Kimberly Lamb, who stares at them from the corner of her eye while other kids halfway down the hall start to laugh.

Anyway. Like she said, that lasts for two months.

***

_ "What happened two months later?" _

_ "Well… Two months later was January eighth. This was 2004." _

_ "Oh." _

***

On January eighth, 2004, Cherish skips school. It's a Thursday. She has a doctor's note. It's not for the school, it's for her.

It's for her parents.

Her parents bring it home the night before.

Her parents are silent at breakfast. 

They tell her to put on a coat and get into the car with them. This is strange. Her parents love that you can walk anywhere in Limetown before you get tired. Their house is nearer the center of town, and they only use their car to get groceries. Cherish hasn't been sick since they moved here, but they walk home from work with a doctor's note, and in the morning they take a car to a squat white building and park right out front. They go through a door that says  _ Outpatient Care. _

Her parents think she doesn't know what's going on. They are being very quiet. They ask Cherish to be very quiet. Cherish can be very quiet, because she's gotten used to it with hardly anybody to talk to at school. Cherish can be very quiet and very excited at the same time. She bounces in her shoes, and they squeak on the linoleum floor in the waiting room of the hospital.

Everybody knows that when you get the tech, you have to see a doctor. Cherish doesn't remember the first few kids at school who got the tech, or who told her the first story, but at some point, everybody just knows. 

You have to see a doctor. Your family is getting the tech! Or maybe it's just you and your dad. Or you and your mom. Or you and your mom and your brother, but not your dad. Or whatever. But it's happening. It happens at the hospital, and you don't go to school until they adjust your dose of the supplement to your body weight, and you get to stay home and eat ice cream.

But when the nurse comes out to get them, he only asks for Cherish. He doesn't ask for Cherish and her mom. Or Cherish and her dad.

Just. Cherish.

***

_ "Your parents were okay with you getting the tech, but not them? I find it difficult to imagine parents wanting that." _

_ "They sure as hell didn't act like it. They were stormy after. When they talked to me, they acted like they were pissed. They got angry when I didn't answer fast enough. They thought I was ignoring them." _

_ "Do you think they were pressured into consenting to the operation?" _

_ "I mean. I wasn't involved. But I know when we moved there, they signed some contracts. I think maybe they didn't read them completely. I don't want to speak ill of them or sound angry. But I think maybe they didn't finish reading them." _

***

Her grades get better, but only a little. It's taking time to figure out how to concentrate. Of course the supplement helps, but it still feels like walking on Jell-O. Before, she scrambled in classes where she couldn't hear the teacher. Now she has to figure out how to give book reports when it feels like her vocal cords are shriveling up because her brain is always firing some message to somebody.

Kimberly starts to talk to her again.

She says, "I missed you."

Cherish says, "I missed you too."

It might have been okay. Cherish is twelve, and she thinks that everyone is going to get the tech eventually. Cherish thinks that the goal of Limetown is to perfect this technology and make sure everyone has access. 

Cherish is stupid.

***

_ "I feel like that's unfair." _

_ "Hey, a couple weeks before, I hated my life. I hated Limetown. I hated everybody with the tech." _

_ "But you were twelve. You didn't know what was going to happen." _

_ "Is that your way of asking me what happened?" _

_ "You … did say that you got the tech a month before the panic." _

_ "I can't tell you about that." _

_ "But-" _

_ "Lia, stop. I can't tell you about the end. That's not the point of my story. I was too young to understand the beginning, and I was still too young to understand the end. I was twelve. I was in seventh grade. I'm here to tell you about the middle." _

***

Cherish is stupid.

Cherish hates the tech, and then she gets the tech, and then everything is great. Except she can't talk to her parents fast or good enough anymore and she can't give a book report and she can't go to get strawberry milkshakes because her old friends who don't have the tech are always at the soda shop and they don't want to talk to her anymore.

Wait. Cherish is stupid.  _ She _ doesn't want to talk to  _ them  _ anymore.

(Both are true. Both are happening at the same time.)

Cherish is twelve, and when you are twelve in Limetown, you spend most of your time in one brick building. You get there early because now you eat breakfast at school. You stay late because you and Kimberly want to try out for the track team in the spring and the middle school has its own track. You spend almost all day, five days a week, crammed into a tiny space where some people get doctor's notes delivered to them at night and some people don't.

Cherish is twelve. The other survivors, the people who go out and talk to Lia Haddock, build the tech. They build their families around having the tech, or not having the tech. They come out the same as they were, but different. They had already grown up by the time they got to Limetown, and that determines their course there.

Cherish grows up  _ in  _ Limetown. Growing up in Limetown sucks.

Cherish doesn't know what kind of person she was going to be, but someone decided to change that, and stuck a piece of metal in her head and Cherish is  _ sorry  _ that Dr. Finlayson is dead, she is  _ sorry  _ that those people killed him, but if you're stupid in Limetown and you stay stupid after, it's your own damn fault. Cherish is stupid in Limetown. Cherish is twelve in Limetown.

Cherish doesn't live in Limetown anymore, and she isn't twelve, and she has no excuse to be stupid. Cherish doesn't think it's an  _ impressive  _ idea to put pieces of metal in kids' heads when they're born and when Dr. Finlayson said that Cherish threw her glass against the wall.

Lia said that Dr. Finlayson's idea was monstrous. Cherish wants to tell everyone:

***

_ "I grew up in the middle of Limetown. It. Was. Monstrous." _

***

Anyway. That's Cherish's story. That's the story of what Limetown was like, for the people who didn't help to make it.

***

_ "Before I turn off the recorder, can I ask one more thing?" _

_ "I mean, if it'll only take a few minutes. I have to get going." _

_ "I know you said you wouldn't talk about the end. But I have to ask… What about Kimberly?" _

_ "Hah. Well. Turn off the recorder, and I'll tell you." _

***

Lia is reluctant, but she's turned off her recorder before.

She puts it into her pocket so Cherish won't worry. She doesn't want to set the other woman off again. When she'd started talking about why she called herself stupid, Lia's heart had jumped to her throat. Cherish had started pacing, until she'd picked up her glass and snapped about Dr. Finlayson she'd picked up her glass and for a second it'd looked like she was going to throw it against the wall just for emphasis.

Cherish sighs and rubs her hands against her face. She suddenly looks like she's ten years older than she is, not just ten years older than when she was last in Limetown. Lia is suddenly struck by the light filtering through the kitchen curtains to Cherish's dark skin, and she thinks she'll describe it as gauzy and purple in the podcast. People seem to like when she makes atmospheric comments. 

It seems to make things more real.

"I'm not supposed to know where Kimberly is. None of us are supposed to know where each other are. I can't tell you why, so don't ask," Cherish says. "But Kimberly was my best friend from the first day I moved to Limetown. And she was still my best friend on February eighth, when it all went to shit."

It's an invitation. Lia takes half a step forward. She has to commit this to memory, so she can tell people about it later. All of the manic, raging energy from just a few minutes ago has bled out of Cherish and she seems … resolute. She lowers her hands from her face and looks at Lia with dark, liquid eyes.

"Kimberly is still my best friend," Cherish says. She smiles, slowly, so her teeth flash behind her lips. "And after you leave, I'm going to get her."

***

Lia's hands shake when she's in her car again. She wants to get out of here as fast as possible. By now she's almost used to this level of - of thrill, joy and shock and the blast of discovery all twisted together. Or, not almost used to it, but she can get her keys into the ignition and drive away from the tiny apartment Cherish has called home up until today.

When she gets back to her hotel, she chains the door shut. She calls her office but no one answers and she doesn't know what to say in a voicemail, so she hangs up without saying anything.

Before she can forget any of it, she sits cross-legged on the bed and types up the entire thing. She skips over the exact wording of the bits she has recorded.

What's important is making sure she remembers every detail she can. The chipped blue paint in the entryway where Cherish clearly shoved the door open too hard at least once. The snowflake print glasses she'd served ice water in.

The way she looked, and how she'd carried herself, seeming younger at the beginning of the conversation than the end. Lia really wants to make sure people know that when she left, Cherish was standing straight up, smiling at her from the doorway. She wants people to know that Cherish had laughed, and hugged her on her way out.

It feels important. It feels real.

When Lia finally lays down because she's too tired to sit up anymore, she pushes off her jeans without getting up. She doesn't want to sleep in them. Shoving them off her hips makes a neatly folded piece of paper fall out of her pocket.

Lia turns the light back on to read it.

_ I know you feel guilty about Dr. Finlayson, but don't feel guilty about me. I'm not twelve anymore. We aren't going to get killed. _

_ Good luck, Lia Haddock. _

_ Don't be stupid. _


End file.
